"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you."
--Ford Madox Ford

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Warren Hammond's "KOP"

Warren Hammond's debut novel is KOP, recently published by Tor Books. Its sequel, Ex-KOP, is due to hit book stores in 2008. Currently, he is writing Tolegate, a science fiction novel independent of the KOP series.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to the new novel and reported the following:

Does the test work? For KOP, I'd have to say no.

If I really try to boil down what is already a hardboiled story to its bare essence, KOP is two things: a character and a place. Page 99 does happen to capture an event that goes a long way toward defining the main character and many of his future decisions, but the place is absent on that particular page, although it's prominently featured on the previous page. Can I blame the publisher for not lining up the page breaks just right?

The character is Juno, a dirty cop with a violent past. He's a man who has done a lot of bad in his life, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. Despite his past sins, during the course of a murder investigation, an opportunity for redemption presents itself as he uncovers a plot that threatens his people's very way of life.

And the place is Lagarto, a jungle planet in our distant future. Lagarto is a world damned by economic isolation, poverty and rampant crime. It's a place that's so corrupted that even good deeds require a little bone breaking.

So you see, without the world, Juno is just a brute. And without Juno, the world doesn't have its savior. Can't have one without the other.